It takes time to educate companies. Even if you could educate them, that will not change the company culture. In most companies even the in-house web experts are fighting against windmills most of the time.

We, the people in web industry are extremely passionate. That’s why we are pushing so hard to bring the best possible results to our employers or clients.

However, if we didn’t receive enough affection and recognition back, we would feel exhausted and tired. Of course, a pat on the back is not enough. We really need to see the result of our effort. If we had done our part the best we could, we would have expected no less from other parties involved in the process.

I’m just speculating here, but it could be that the primary reason for leaving companies and client work has something to do with the outcomes that — despite all our efforts — didn’t turn exactly as we planned.

Being your own boss means having the whole process under your control and opportunity to apply an insane level of obsession over the tiniest details, a typical tendency of top experts in the field. I wonder what would happen if all the best of breed experts started building their own brands.

A major shift perhaps?

I was invited by Ivica to participate in a panel to discuss the current state of web design in Croatia (and in the world) especially from the perspective of commercial production and mass-market trends. As the debate ensued we also discussed and touched upon the future of web / interactive design.

This topic was of specific interest to me as ever since the Biennale of Croatian Design 09/10 the previous year I have been thinking about this, occasionally discussing with peers the classification of web / interactive media design. However, until recently it is something I have never really discussed in public.

A good proportion of web design today descends from print / graphic design and these influences are becoming even more prevalent. Typography for the web is now all the rage especially as we are (finally) able to use different fonts other than the tried and tested workhorses Arial, Verdana & Georgia. A direct result of this development (coupled with newly evolving and usable CSS properties) is that once again we are seeing the realms of web design opening up right before our eyes. Therefore, solid knowledge of typography and typographic principles should really be a must for every screen designer today especially when taking into account the general intricacies involved with consumer grade computer devices and displays. Furthermore, the basic fundamentals of typography have more or less remained unchanged for decades and hence should be openly embraced.

Note: For students and novices unfamiliar with basic typographic principles there is certainly an abundance of great books and online resources available.

Despite these new exciting developments are we not possibly over-looking the bigger picture? The Internet is now no longer solely consumed within the desktop browser. The introduction of alternative, more native interaction systems such as touch screens and 3D gestures has altered the landscape and the way in which we all interact with and use the Internet. It can therefore be argued that as a result of these developments we should focus less on graphic design principles and instead focus more on specific principles of industrial / product design.

Digital space designers should attempt to re-discover philosophy, sociology, psychology, human behavior, physiology, neurology, anthropometry etc. After all, those are the fundamental disciplines of human-computer interaction and — in broader context — Human factors science.

On the one hand graphic design ergonomics are simpler to understand and apply in comparison to what has to be taken into account when designing for the digital space, simply because it is an established discipline that has been around for a lot longer.

On the other hand it can be said that the generation of technology savvy, multitaskers born about after the advent of the Internet no longer have the time nor desire to consume as much written (textual-based) content especially when up against rich multimedia content (pictures, audio, video), content that can be described as being more cognitive. Hence, for that reason such users are likely to find rich dynamic / interactive content easier to relate to as well as quicker to consume and follow. As the old saying goes ‘a picture is worth a thousand words’ and the same could possibly be said for all types of rich multimedia content!

Furthermore, multimedia content in the era of mobile publishing is much more feasible and cost-effective to produce and deliver than at any other time in the past. To a certain extent the tides have started to turn in terms of the ratio between written (textual-based) content vs. multimedia content, with a shift more towards the later, as well as the idea that what was essentially the status quo of the past within the web medium should not directly influence or hinder new developments, neither today nor in the future.

One of the guests on the panel, renowned Croatian designer Boris Ljubičić, remarked “the World needs another Gutenberg in order to make us abandon type as a primary communication interface”.

Are we ready for this?

…

Special thanks goes to @radebrujic who prettified my rather dull prose.

Dell U2711 is significantly cheaper here in Croatia than 27-inch LED Cinema Display. It’s a smart alternative, especially if you don’t like glossy screens.

But are there any caveats?

Color-spaces for web design

Internet is all in sRGB, i.e. the relatively small color-space. This standard is brought by Microsoft and HP back in the days, to create a common denominator for consumer grade systems and it’s a default for Windows PCs.

I found this article a good starting point to understand differences between various color-spaces: Setting a Work Color Space in Digital Photo Professional.

If you are designing for the web exclusivelly, it’s best to work in sRGB. Learn how to set up Color Management for web design.

Oversaturated colors issue

Macs output colors in Apple RGB, so if a monitor can handle it, it will display colors more vivid, and somewhat truer to the real colors.

Apple is shipping displays that are not wide-gamut, but probably Apple RGB (at the time of this writing I haven’t found exact technical specs).

Apple displays are calibrated to Apple RGB and for the average PC user the picture is rich in colors. Apple’s products are also evenly calibrated to keep consistent experience across platforms, but that also gives you troubles once you pair Apple product with something else.

Dell U2711 is wide-gamut monitor, which means out-of-the-box colors will look too saturated than you probably used to using your laptop’s display or regular (lower-gammut) LCDs.

The display has quite a lot OSD controls, which was in my case miss-leading. There’s an option to set gamma for PC or Mac and also some handy color-space presets.

In Snow Leopard, default gamma is 2.2 (like the rest of the World) and not 1.8 like in Leopard (read how to make your display’s gamma in Leopard match Snow Leopard).

Setting gamma to Mac will create over-saturated picture and if you try different OSD presets, you’ll probably notice that nothing changes, even though you are switching between sRGB and Adobe RGB which are significantly different.

To make Dell U2711 display proper sRGB colors, set gamma back to PC and choose sRGB from the presets menu. This gives you the most accurate colors for web design and general use via built-in OSD.

At this point you might want to calibrate with OS X calibration software under System Preferences – Displays – Color – Calibrate. In my case Dell’s default .icc profile was a little greenish (Dell’s profile was already in there when MacBook Pro detected new display).

I was not happy with the results, so I calibrated mine using Spyder3Pro. Download .icc profile and see if this suits your particular display.

The created profile is more or less accurate. Spyder3Pro is a calibration tool for photographers and from what I learned on the internet forums not very accurate with spot colors, so I’m interested to give ColorMunki Design a try sometimes in the future, just to make sure this is true (Belgian graphic/web designer Veerle Pieters wrote a ColorMunki review back in 2009.).

Connectivity

I’m still working on a MacBook Pro with DVI port, so it was a breeze for me to connect the display with included Dual-Link DVI cable.

Newer Apple laptops are shipped with Mini DisplayPort, which leaves you with either Mini DisplayPort to Dual-Link DVI adapter or Mini DisplayPort to DisplayPort cable (both Dual-Link DVI and DisplayPort cables are included with the monitor).

However, I didn’t try any of these, so I suggest you investigate more about Dell U2711 + MacBook Mini DisplayPort.

The former is available in Apple Store, but costs $99 or $75 in OWC, and the later is $25 in OWC store (I’m not affiliated with OWC, but they ship items almost anywhere in the World).

Obviously, cable is a better option than adapters, but it might not suit your particular setup.

The trouble is — designers and developers don’t settle for current minimum, we are always into something new. So, by the time a giant vendor locks the feature list, a more flexible and agile competition goes miles away.

In the era of rounded corners/borders and transparency made possible purely with CSS, IE team missed to implement both, or at least in the form that wouldn’t require separate style-sheets files to conform to W3C guidelines.

I checked a few dozens of CSS-based web sites, and I’m not even sure anymore if everything works because developers payed special attention to IE 6 and IE 7, or is it because IE 8 is mature enough to render CSS layouts properly.

What works, what isn’t working

PNGs work without hacking. Rounded corners with CSS not. Text shadow — no. Alpha transparency is still possible only with proprietary filter property, for instance filter: alpha(opacity=10);.

Naturally, if you want your CSS to validate — this rule has to be extracted in separate file, preferably with conditional comments.

The old typeface order bug is still present, and easy font embedding with @font-face doesn’t work either, so if you prefer this method, read how to do it in IE.

Even though it took us a decade so everyone knows there’s always a better browser, regular Joe doesn’t know a tiniest little bit about basic functionalities; how to control text size in a browser, open link in a new tab with a single mouse click or about simple technologies like RSS. Let’s face it — it’s complicated.

Usability, accessibility and web standards as a nouns, are exclusively the geek vocabulary entries, so let’s not giving it so much meaning in terms of general Earth population acceptance. Standards are here to help web workers, who are down here in a trenches — to win a battle in a never-ending vendor fight for their piece of market share.

Specs change and we have to accept that. Get through your shift and give your best. We are unknown heroes! Our time is now.

So I hope

Once vendors get across the boundaries of the current systems — by providing affordable advanced devices and then by writing more powerful software — today’s interfaces will be history. Is that possible in the next 14 years? I hope so.

On the other hand, web developers and web designers are seasoned computer users, which are most of the time after the latest technology — software-wise, hardware-wise, interface-wise. This breed often has several browsers for different contexts.

Ordinary people (who are not dealing with web for money) find it hard to remember browser history stack, don’t need to learn keyboard shortcuts, they don’t know the difference between Comic Sans and Cooper Black, and they don’t know the difference between Internet Explorer and Firefox.

That is our job — we need to know those differences, and provide the best possible experience.

That’s why CSS people are called experts. They can do miracles, when everything else fails. Any fool can code for the latest browser, but experts take care of every browser with significant share.

Consider this Wikipedia article: Usage Share of Web Browsers.

In the end, let me share some quick numbers from a few random high profile web sites. All of these are in the company of six- and seven-figures visitors/mth.

Mr. Allevato developed donationware piece of software to enhance your Mail.app Dock icon with extra counters: MailBadger 0.3.

Quick Tip!

The default set of rules in MailBadger allow you to only specify per account and/or per folder condition.

However, there’s built-in conditions editor that allows you to include all unread messages if From field doesn’t contain a specified string.

Type non-existing e-mail address and voilà!

Figure 1. Select “messages satisfying condition” and hit “Edit Conditions”.

Figure 2. Select “Does not contain” and add fake sender.

HRT robbed BBC.

This is the embarrassment of the decade for the Croatian web community.

Follow the original thread at mi3dot.org. It is a Google’s translation from Croatian to English, but you’ll get the picture.

If you care, please let us know.

More voices:

• zytzagoo: HRT vs BBC
• Marketing Servis: HRT.hr i BBC.co.uk ko brata dva!
• T-portal: HRT ‘posudio’ dizajn od BBC-ja?
• Davor Peić Gavran: Croatian HRT vs BBC.co.uk, totally rip off
• Index: Iz koda HRT-ove stranice najednom nestalo ime tvrtke koja ju je radila
• Index: HRT-ova nova web stranica besramni plagijat bbc.co.uk
• Index: Hašim Bahtijari: Pitat ću na Vijeću koliko je novaca utrošeno na izradu novih stranica HRT-a
• Index: Dizajneri složni: HRT je pokrao BBC, i to loše
• Marko Mihelčić: Croatian national television website (HRT) fancy’s BBC website.
• Nivas Blog: How HRT failed in their intention to become Croatian BBC
• Wolfwood’s Crowd: Ripanje i ripersko prigovaranje

If that’s the case, here’s the quick tip.

First, make sure the Time Capsule recognizes the printer. You can check that under the “Manual Setup” in your Airport Utility.

Next, open System Preferences, choose “Print & Fax” and hit the plus button on the left (i.e. add printer). At this point you should already have your printer drivers installed on the computer.

The default tab is the most probably IP and that is misguiding. Switch to “Default” and wait a couple of seconds. This however could take a while, just don’t close the window too soon. When the list is updated, select a printer from the list (the “Kind” column should indicate Bonjour).

Finally, hit “Add” on the same screen and you’re done.

In his book, Mark Hurst gives you easy to follow how-to for the most common everyday scenarios as well as the best practice tips for maintaining the digital discipline on a daily basis.

In a nutshell, a bit-literate user is more productive. By letting the bits go, information overload can be avoided.

Probably, the most significant chapter is Other Essentials, where the author reveals the inevitable truth — bit literacy is going to be the digital age standard. Sooner than anyone expects.

I only wish this book was shipped as a part of an operating system installation guide when I bought the first computer.

Virtualization software

Parallels is complete and stable, but a piece of software you will have to pay for. The price of 80 USD per license isn’t unacceptably high for an average web developer, but if you’re cutting your expenses, this might turn you down. In any case, you can download trial and evaluate if it’s worth the price. Anyway… from the version 3.0, the application supports 3D graphics and various USB devices, but it also has a set of supplementary tools, such as Transporter, which helps you migrate your existing Windows PC to a Parallels Virtual Machine. Parallels support bunch of OSes.

At the time of this writing, VMware Fusion is in its’ beta 4 version and is free to download. So far, it works pretty stable on my MacBook Pro, even in situations when both Vista + IE7 and XP + IE6 virtual machines are up. If you opt to use Fusion, there’s over 450 preconfigured virtual machines that can be found at Virtual Appliance Marketplace.

Virtual PC can’t be run on Intel-based Mac, but if you’re on PowerPC, it will cost you 129 USD for standalone or 219 USD for VPC7 + Windows XP Home. VirtualPC for Windows is free. The advantage of VirtualPC are preconfigured time-bombed ISO images available from Microsoft. There are WindowsXP + IE6 and Windows XP + IE7 installations currently available and those will run till August 17, 2007.

Boot Camp is really not a virtualization application. What it does is lets you boot to either Mac OS or Windows installation and it is obvious that it’s impossible to test web pages in such an environment. Boot Camp will be shipped with Mac OS X Leopard, but until then, if you want to, you can download Boot Camp from Apple.com.

Operating Systems

We’re currently testing pages in the following virtual setups (note that besides virtualization app of your choice, you’ll probably have to purchase a license for each of your separate OS installations):

• Windows XP SP2 + IE6, Firefox 1.5.x and Opera 8.5
• Windows Vista + IE7, Firefox 2.x and Opera 9.x
• Suse 10 + Konqueror and Firefox

Browsers

Older browsers can be found at evolt.org, the latest at download.com. Opera keeps browser archive and so does Netscape. If needed, download Firefox 1.5.

What more to say? Have a happy cross-browser testing!

Got it directly from Malarkey’s referrer logs — Transcending CSS iPod shuffle. BTW, have you Spotted the diffrence?

Zeldman’s recent trouble with his DSL line encouraged me not to pull all my hair off. Luckily, my dilemma was somewhat of a different nature. Since we live in a rented flat plus the local branch of T-com won’t sell you a DSL line separated from a phone line (and the phone line owner, which I’m not in this case), the default modem/router they’d provide along with a two year contract was not an option.

For the last few weeks I spent some time learning how to match PCs and Mac on the same network—you know: manually et all. In fact I always wanted to learn more about this area, but never had a need for it… We have almost five years old XP Pro installation on my main PC and only God knows what ports and sockets I blocked back then when it was the only machine in the house. With PC being such a fortress, traditional Windows Network Setup Wizard wasn’t very helpful, so I had to buy some extra hardware to handle all the traffic. When I purchased it, the super quiet MacBook Pro was meant to be the only machine still awake and working in those late evenings when the family is in bed.

Router, DHCP and network setup

The real trouble was the original modem provided by the ISP, which was connected to the PC with USB cable. Needless to say, that particular model is absolutely useless with Mac OS, but the local telecom supports Windows OS only. Thanks for nothing… Finally, I bought D-link DSL-G684T DSL Wireless Router (Download manual & latest firmware in Croatian). I’d go for LinkSys, but unfortunately they don’t have wireless routers with DSL modem built-in.

Anyway, if you want’t to do it right, you have to do it yourself. Automatic DHCP didn’t last long, ‘cause with every restart of any of the network devices all the IP’s messed up. At the end all the relations had to be set manually, so now the router is 192.168.1.1, PC is 192.168.1.2, Mac 192.168.1.3 and so on…

In the router interface, which is by the way rich with options, but ugly as hell—I set a range of static IPs, with MAC/IP pairs, so now there is no IP hijacking when some of the machines is pulled out. All the non-assigned IPs are disabled, which is additional security layer (at least that’s what they told me).

On to DSL setup…

The thing which caused me the most headache were VPI and VCI numbers, which were predefined for the German market. Fortunately (or sadly), I was not the first one with such a trouble, so I found a valuable forum post, where I found correct VPI and VCI values along with solutions for other possible causes that are on your way when establishing ADSL connection.

A few additional home networking security tips

WEP security protocol is easy to crack—you probably wouldn’t want to support all the neighborhood kids hanging on your line. WPA/WPA2 Personal is much more secure, but some older devices won’t work with it. Read very brief Configure Wireless Security for small Network.

Another security layer is limiting your antenna transmit power to as low as possible. For my needs I lowered it all the way down to 6% (the lowest value router allows) and it still gives me great performance anywhere in the condo. Naturally, if you keep your signal down, less network scanners would notice your presence.